Seminar Description:
The key questions addressed in this seminar are as follows: Whether and how can historically and geographically grounded ethnographies engage critically with discourses and processes of neoliberal globalization? How can they illuminate larger-scale processes in ways that are enabling of critical practices? How can they address emerging debates about new forms of imperialism? What are the special demands – conceptual, methodological, and political – on ethnographic research that seeks to grapple with these issues?

A central argument of this seminar is that concepts of spatiality emerging from critical human geography have a major role to play in developing politically enabling and non-reductionist understandings of political economy, culture, and power in an increasingly interdependent world. A guiding premise is the need to confront questions of capitalist development - not as an unfolding teleology nor as an inexorable process driven by technology and markets - but in terms of multiple, diverse, non-linear, interconnected trajectories of socio-spatial change that are actively constitutive of the processes we call “globalization.”

The first part of the seminar is organized around a set of theoretical lineages and their methodological entailments. Its purpose is to clarify (a) how the concrete propositions that frame any research agenda are always theoretically and contextually driven; (b) the inseparability of theory and method; and (c) the political stakes. In the second part of the seminar we will read a set of ethnographies, and focus on the research projects of seminar participants.

The seminar is particularly relevant to doctoral students who are in the process of formulating research questions and proposals, and will function in part as a workshop for collective engagement with one another’s work.

The seminar will be limited to a maximum of 12 participants to enable such in-depth engagement. If you have questions about the relevance of the seminar to your research interests, please contact me at hart@berkeley.edu.